By Heather Bellow Thursday, Jan. 5, 2016
A stand of hemlocks in
Otis State Forest in Sandisfield, which will be cleared for the proposed path
of Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company’s new storage loop. Native American Tribal
preservationists are concerned about the possible destruction or tampering with
sacred ceremonial stone sites along the 3.8-mile pipeline path and are working
with the Kinder Morgan subsidiary to identify and avoid them. But the company
says there are some that it may not be able to save.
Sandisfield MA — A letter from a Narragansett Indian
Tribal official to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the
federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) accuses FERC of
understating the “likely” destruction of “ancient ceremonial stone landscape
features” along the path of Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company’s proposed
new storage loop through Otis State Forest.
At the edge of
the old-growth forest in Otis State Forest, some of which Tennessee Gas Company
will clear to widen a pipeline corridor for its new storage loop. Photo:
Heather Bellow
In his Jan. 3,
2017, letter, Doug Harris, the Narragansett Tribal Nation’s deputy tribal
historic preservation officer and preservationist for ceremonial landscapes,
said FERC’s Dec. 29, 2016, letter to Reid Nelson, director at ACHP, which was
copied to preservationists from seven different tribes, “mildly portrays the
dire” consequences of “bulldozing” sacred features on the company’s newly
acquired easement there... Harris says while FERC’s letter does concede that,
pursuant to the National Historic Preservation Act, the company’s Connecticut
Expansion Project will have an “adverse effect on historic properties (multiple
ceremonial landscape features in Berkshire County, MA)” but “avoids the
destructive truth of desecration and the lack of Tribal participation in the
resolution… FERC sent a December letter to Nelson asking him to weigh in on the
situation since “the Massachusetts State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO)
has chosen not to…””
SHPO falls under
the aegis of the Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin’s office.
Spokesperson Brian McNiff said the office is reviewing the situation and that a
statement is forthcoming.
But Harris told
the Edge he thinks he knows why Massachusetts is staying out of it. “The SHPO
has a problem,” he said, acknowledging ceremonial stones...”
At one time
several years back, part of my job involved providing some "recreational
driving around" therapy up in that Colebrook CT/Sandisfield MA area, often
noting possible (well, obvious) features of an Indigenous Ceremonial Stone
Landscape. Nice to have a corroborating second opinion. I'd actually just been
thinking about that a couple days ago when I read this: “Going back to the
point where the roads diverge at Scoville’s barn, a few hundred yards east will
be found a few rocks delineating the spot Henry Manassa’s shack stood, using a
large glacial erratic as the northwest wall...”
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